10: Hughes Belle of Bedford, Ember and Whatnot w/ Robert Jackson (rwjblue)

Robbie Wagner: [00:34] Hey, everybody. We're trying this SquadCast out again with video, audio, all the good things. This is Whiskey Web and Whatnot with myself, Robbie Wagner, my co-host, as always, Charles W. Carpenter III, and our guest today, Robert Jackson from the Ember core team. And do you prefer Robert, Rob? Some variation?

Robert Jackson: [00:58] The old adage, as long as it's not late for dinner, I guess it's fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04] Not RJ blue.

Robert Jackson: [01:05] Just no, that's a really hard-to-pronounce acronym-like thing. I don't know. I've regretted this many times, but it's hard to change now.

Robbie Wagner: [01:19] I assume the W is your middle initial.

Robert Jackson: [01:22] Middle name. Yes. William.

Robbie Wagner: [01:23] What is that, if you William?

Robert Jackson: [01:25] My parents are totally crazy. Basically, they made a Bob Billy. I don't know how you get that so backwards. It should have been Billy Bob. It really should have been. I could have been a great Billy Bob.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:36] You had a chance.

Robbie Wagner: [01:37] Actually, I am the exact same. I am Robert William.

Robert Jackson: [01:41] There you go.

Robbie Wagner: [01:42] Yeah. And my parents thought the same thing. They didn't want me to be Billy Bob, so they switched them.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:48] And I'm just Charles William.

Robert Jackson: [01:51] Yeah, but you get the third. You're, like, all fancy.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:54] Yeah, I try to lean into that.

Robert Jackson: [01:57] Do you ever carry around a monocle or anything?

Chuck Carpenter: [02:00] I should. That could be kind of mine. As I move into my mid-40s, that could start to be my thing. Like leaning into the monocle, but.

Robbie Wagner: [02:08] A cane.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:09] Yeah, I suppose that, too. Yes.

Robbie Wagner: [02:12] Mr. Peanut.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:16] That's going into our branding the next round.

Robbie Wagner: [02:20] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:22] I want an octopus with a cane and a monocle.

Robert Jackson: [02:26] Amazing.

Robbie Wagner: [02:27] I would actually like to see that.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:29] Fair enough.

Robbie Wagner: [02:30] But before we devolve too much, we should start with whiskey, I guess, since that's the first thing, usually. So today, we have Hughes Belle of Bedford straight rye whiskey. It is 95% rye and 5% barley. And I don't think any of us have had this. Well, Chuck tried his early, but I've never had this myself.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:53] I would have been able to lie, except for your capturing video. So now you know. You know.

Robert Jackson: [03:02] Gotta get my sound effects going.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:04] Yeah, I tried to do it. Failed. All right, so, yeah, Robert, our big thing is that I try mine in a fancy Glencairn, like, hand-blown glass, whatever thing that is supposed to do the whole bring the like, make it easier on the nose, and you get less of the alcohol smell. And then I don't use any ice cubes or any of those things because, as the distiller intended is how I try them. That said.

Robbie Wagner: [03:37] I don't.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:37] Yeah, he doesn't he drowns it in ice and crushed ice. So you're getting a lot of water right away.

Robert Jackson: [03:42] I have just a single large cube. Hold on.

Robbie Wagner: [03:45] There you go.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:46] Yeah. Nice.

Robert Jackson: [03:48] You can't see inside, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:50] I do like the large cube.

Robert Jackson: [03:53] I used to spheres, but it was difficult. The crush just melts faster, right? It depends on what you're going for, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [04:00] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [04:00] I started up my ice machine, and it was too slow, so I have normal crushed ice, but we have a nugget ice maker, like the Sonic Ice. So it's thinking that would be good, but it was too slow.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:12] You have to prepare more in advance.

Robbie Wagner: [04:15] Yeah. All right, let's give it a try.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:29] A little leathery for me.

Robbie Wagner: [04:34] It's a little less spicy than. I thought it would be for that much rye. Honestly.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:39] Yeah. I get a little citrus on the nose. I don't taste that, but I do get some leather.

Robert Jackson: [04:45] I get a bit earthiness at the end. I think that's the leather you're talking about, I assume.

Robbie Wagner: [04:50] Yeah. My completely unrefined palate is somehow getting, like, banana. I don't know if I'm crazy there.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:58] But you say it now, that starts to affect my brain a little bit in that I could actually maybe, like, banana or banana peel like.

Robbie Wagner: [05:08] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:12] These are all just very arbitrary. Anyway, what is my descriptor? Your descriptor? Does it actually mean the same thing? It's a pretty funny thing.

Robert Jackson: [05:21] All just perception of senses, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [05:24] Yes. Does a cherry taste the same to me as it does you? I mean, who knows?

Robert Jackson: [05:30] I hope we're not eating the same cherry. That'd be weird.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:34] That's how we get to know each other on this show.

Robert Jackson: [05:36] And then once you break that, who knows? Maybe they're all different.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:43] Yeah. Because there's no way to know that we're having the same flavor.

Robert Jackson: [05:46] Exactly.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:47] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [05:48] This is great. I like it, actually. I agree. It's less spicy than I expected it to be but still quite delightful.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:58] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [06:00] I do like ryes, so I guess maybe I'm spoiled there.

Robbie Wagner: [06:04] But do we all have the same barrel number? That would be.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:08] I'm wondering. So I have 114th proof. I don't know if I have. Oh, yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [06:13] There we go.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:15] Yeah, I see that now. Barrel number 3703.

Robert Jackson: [06:19] Yes. Same mine's. Bottle number 116 of 174.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:23] 114.

Robbie Wagner: [06:26] Where do I see that? Oh, 95. I am really early.

Robert Jackson: [06:30] Wow.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:31] Yeah. And for as strong as it is. It's not real hot.

Robert Jackson: [06:35] The mash bill is right there on the side.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:38] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 95% rye, 5% barley. I know. I'm so used to companies not doing it and having to just look online to track all this stuff down, but I appreciate that. That goes in there.

Robert Jackson: [06:50] That's great. Yeah, it is quite nice.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:52] Hughes brothers from Pennsylvania.

Robert Jackson: [06:55] I feel like oftentimes they try to hide it because there's that proprietary blend or whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:01] Yeah, it's our special family thing. But, I mean, part of that, though, is the yeast, which a lot of these distilleries will have their own proprietary family yeasts over many years, or the master distiller kind of comes in with their own that kind of thing. The grains, and you don't get to know the source of the grains. All kinds of weird things that make it seem like it's hard to make.

Robert Jackson: [07:30] Well, it's in their best interest to make it seem like it's hard, right?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:32] Right. Exactly. Robbie looked into starting his own distillery up in the hills of Virginia.

Robbie Wagner: [07:42] Yeah. Got all the equipment, and then we were willing to do it without the permits. Initially, thinking it's no big deal if we get caught, whatever. But found out it was actually a pretty serious felony.

Robert Jackson: [07:53] Haven't you seen The Dukes of Hazard, man?

Robbie Wagner: [07:56] I don't think so, actually. No.

Robert Jackson: [07:58] Really?

Chuck Carpenter: [07:59] What? There's a generational difference. Like, I can say that I had a Dukes a Hazard Big Wheel as a kid, and I watched it a lot. Loved it. Have seen it more recently. Doesn't play as well.

Robert Jackson: [08:14] Oh, I'm sure it does not stand up. No.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:18] Even aside from how cheesy it is.

Robert Jackson: [08:21] I was not allowed to watch Dukes of Hazard. I would sneak downstairs at 03:00 a.m. And watch it on the television, the one channel we got in over the airwaves.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:35] Wow. That's very solid. You were very dedicated to it. Where did you grow up?

Robert Jackson: [08:43] So northern Illinois. Okay. Out in the boonies in a town, a village, let's say, of 350 people. If you blink, you miss it. Right in the middle of a bunch of cornfields.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:55] Interesting.

Robert Jackson: [08:56] The whole town was on an 80-acre plot, so that was the size of the whole town.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:02] Very interesting. And then you find yourself here in the technology landscape.

Robert Jackson: [09:09] Yeah, it's a crazy town. I've had pit stops along the way, so I was down in Florida for a long time, about 15, 16 years. And now I'm up in Rhode Island.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:21] Yeah, I can understand that escape. Although we're planning our family vacation road trip for the month of July, we're going to make our way out to Florida. For some reason, I think Disney is a part of that.

Robert Jackson: [09:36] I feel like I will also be in Florida in July. We have a condo on the beach that we like to visit. Timeshare set up for the 4 July. We get the week of the Fourth off for work. So that's quite nice, though. The whole company is sort of everyone except for some folks trying to maintain this, make sure the site stays up, which is pretty important. Get to take time off. So it's kind of nice. It's a nice little perk. Come back, and you don't have 10,000 emails from everyone because you took vacation and they didn't.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:16] Right. That's smart.

Robbie Wagner: [10:18] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:19] I like that.

Robbie Wagner: [10:23] Yeah. So I guess we should give this a rating we do out of eight tentacles rating for whiskeys.

Robert Jackson: [10:30] Okay.

Robbie Wagner: [10:32] I don't know if it's the is.

Robert Jackson: [10:34] It always a whole number, or can you have a fraction of tentacle?

Robbie Wagner: [10:38] We haven't done a fraction yet, but we would allow a fraction.

Robert Jackson: [10:42] Like what's? Calamari but a fraction of a tentacle?

Chuck Carpenter: [10:47] Yes. There we go.

Robert Jackson: [10:51] I'm sorry. You're in for it today.

Robbie Wagner: [10:54] Yeah, that's fine.

Chuck Carpenter: [10:56] Wait until you pour your second. Wait until you pour the second.

Robert Jackson: [10:59] I see it's a trap.

Robbie Wagner: [11:04] I think I would give this maybe a six-ish. Pretty good. I don't know. It's not my favorite, but I like it pretty well.

Robert Jackson: [11:15] Okay, so question about the details around the rating system. Eight being the best you've ever had of any type of whiskey or the best of this type of whiskey?

Robbie Wagner: [11:25] Of any whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:29] It's real loose here.

Robert Jackson: [11:31] That's a hard one.

Chuck Carpenter: [11:33] Yeah, we tend to have a lot of sixes, few sevens. I don't know that we've had any eights.

Robbie Wagner: [11:41] Occasionally with that maple syrup one. Like a lower number?

Chuck Carpenter: [11:47] Yeah, it was really bad. It was a rye finished in maple barrels, and it tasted musty and I don't know, it was not good for me.

Robert Jackson: [11:59] That is not a word you want associated with something you're going to drink.

Robbie Wagner: [12:03] We were halfway through the podcast, and Chuck goes, no, can't do it. Just went and got another whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:12] Yeah, I'm going to agree with a six. I think this is a good rye. It's not complex, but it is easy to drink. Would drink again. I don't remember what its price point was. So that is perhaps does that affect our opinions? I don't know. In a way, for me, it does. Normally, if you go on and make a choice, I think it's 80 a bottle. Yeah. So I think for 80, I might have expected a little more complexity. I don't know what age statement they would have on here, and that could kind of ryes are tricky in that bit, though. They can be like two years.

Robert Jackson: [12:45] Eight-year-old straight rye whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [12:48] Eight is good. I would have expected a little more woodiness out of that or whatever. Maybe that's my leather and whatever barrels they chose. But yeah, six good. I think I would recommend people trying it. I would have again. I don't know how many times I'd rebuy the bottle, though. I like it better than Michter's. Let me say that Michter's, another Pennsylvania distillery, was like old-school whiskey. And then, I don't know, it has kind of a strange reputation these days. Unless you're getting their ten or 20-year release, Michter's is okay for me. So I like this better than Michter's.

Robert Jackson: [13:30] I'm going to go with the group. I'm going to go with the six. I really dig ryes, and I like this. And I probably would buy it again, actually. It's a nice even rye. It's good drinking straight. I could totally see mixing it in like an Old Fashioned or something as well. Probably would not do ice if I were doing it again because I don't basically with a rye oftentimes, I'll go with an ice cube because it'll reduce a little bit of that spiciness over time. But this just doesn't seem to have a lot of spiciness anyway. I guess, in retrospect, I might dump the ice cube, but we always have a second glass. So there's time.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:16] Yeah. I am not opposed to continuing on beyond this initial taste. That's why I always try everything up, and then I save some to try with either a little ice or I even geek out and do the few drops of water to aerate it and give it a little bit of.

Robbie Wagner: [14:35] Your precise, measured water.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:37] Yeah, it's just one of those little dropper bottles.

Robert Jackson: [14:40] A little dropper? Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:42] Well, I used to live around the corner in DC. There was that bar, the Jack Rose. Did you ever go there?

Robert Jackson: [14:47] I've heard of it, but I've never been there.

Chuck Carpenter: [14:49] It's insane. It's the best whiskey bar I've ever been to, and hopefully, it's sustaining decently post-pandemic.

Robbie Wagner: [14:55] What about the one in Portland?

Chuck Carpenter: [14:57] That was fun. It was good. But no one can touch the depth of the Jack Rose thus far. I've been a few places in San Francisco and stuff, too, that are like touted as, and there's one called like, I think it's like Hay Needle or Haystack or something like that in Louisville that also has a pretty good whiskey selection. And given that they're in the motherland, I was thinking bourbon because that's one of my go-to. I was thinking like, oh, man, they're just going to crush it. But the Jack Rose still wins, and it was dangerous. I lived around the corner, so I'd get tastes of things. Get like a two-ounce pour, do the first little bit up, add some drops, try it again, and then if it was really like, okay, I need more, then you can always add ice. It gets really diverse. It's almost like trying two or three different whiskeys sometimes.

Robbie Wagner: [15:48] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [15:50] The problem I always have in those scenarios is after there's a tail off of your ability to taste. Well, I think, at least for me, and even just flights that are lower volume than a two or three finger of pour, I guess I feel like if you do in the wrong order, you end up blowing it out or, anyways, I find those quite hard. I try really hard to stick with one through the duration, but that really defeats the purpose of places like this, where they have so many options. It's just so hard.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:28] Yeah. You've got to go and really take advantage of it. Like I said, it was dangerous for a little while when I lived around the corner, and whiskey prices weren't as crazy at that time. I mean, the last time we were there when you had pours that were like $50 an ounce or on up, and for things that didn't seem like it should be that crazy, then you really got to do it right. But, yeah, they say that you go from low to high proof is one of the things I do find that crackers, like, unsalted, like oyster crackers in between, will help cleanse the palate, too, and give you a little bit of break. Yeah. So those are some of the tips and tricks.

Robert Jackson: [17:05] That seems good. Yeah, I'll definitely give it a whirl. And I was talking to Robbie about this. My default go-to is like a Scotch, and then rye as a second, but the Scotch prices have just been through the roof, so it's tough to find a good one on the rye front. I've been going through a bit of Whistle Pig kick lately. I think this sits nicely with us. So not quite their Boss Hog, I guess, which is, I think, a 15-year, if I recall. But the ten-year totally does it justice. It's just a little less spicy, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:54] Yeah. So you answered one of my questions, which would have been around, like, kind of, where's your jam? Normally in the rye bit. I don't know if you've talked with Robbie any about his regular. He's got a rye that he's always going to.

Robbie Wagner: [18:14] Sagamore Spirits rye. It's fairly cheap and fairly good, so it's hard to beat when that combo is there.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:23] And I recommend it in particular, if you can get a barrel proof one, they're like 50, $60. And I wasn't expecting much. And I go back to it quite a bit. I think that's really good. And then on the other side, if you want some of that spice and then especially, like, going right into the cube, I don't know if you've had the Willett four-year rye.

Robert Jackson: [18:45] I have not.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:47] I also highly recommend that.

Robert Jackson: [18:48] Well, got it right down, got the old pen out.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:53] Yeah. So I've been doing Willett for years. Been to the distillery a couple of times. It is becoming harder and harder to get a lot of their other things. They have a pot still, bourbon. A couple of other small things, but they have a rye that they've been distilling themselves. And it was a three year. Now it bumped to a four. It's real good. It's been, like, pretty consistent and good even through both of those differences in age statement. Have you gone down the path of Japanese whiskeys, though?

Robert Jackson: [19:25] So I have not. Mostly because I have a nice collection of Scotches I really enjoy, and I just haven't branched out into the Japanese whiskeys. I realize they're not Scotch, but they're on my list, basically. I do think that I would prefer over bourbon. I like a good bourbon, especially, like in some Old Fashioned setups or whatever in a mixed drink, I guess, is what I was going to say, which is probably sacrilege for this podcast. But hey, we are who we are. I just think they're too sweet, straight. It's too sweet for me for what it is. If I'm going to go neat, I'm going to go with usually a rye these days. I do have the Boss Hog, which is, I think, a 15 Whistle Pig. It's quite good. That's probably the top-shelf rye that I have. But probably my, I'd say, daily driver, though. Not daily, weekly, monthly. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:41] I don't judge.

Robert Jackson: [20:43] It's a safe space. I appreciate that. Is the ten-year it's just less expensive. You can have it. I dig that.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:55] Yeah. I mean, whether you're having it daily or not, your daily sipper is usually something like that that you would say, like, oh, it's got a good price point. I can have it on the regular.

Robert Jackson: [21:05] You don't feel bad about drinking it?

Chuck Carpenter: [21:07] You don't feel bad about drinking it if you dip it into a cocktail that's not too crazy. Maybe not all the time. I'm going to recommend that you look up this rye cocktail called the Final Ward.

Robert Jackson: [21:20] The Final ward.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:22] Yes. So I also like gin. That's kind of like my side chick, and Negronis are my jam. Especially during the summer. It's hot here in Phoenix, blah, blah, blah. We all move to the desert, and then we're surprised when the sun burns our skin. I don't know how that happens, but yeah, Negronis had been my jam. A colleague reached recently introduced me to a cocktail called The Last Word. It's gin-based, has absinthe, a maraschino liqueur, and lime juice, and there's a tweak on that called The Final Ward. Love both of those. So the Final Ward is a rye-based cocktail lemon juice. The other two things are still there, and it's good. I wasn't expecting a lot. I was like, oh, this seems kind of interesting, but you have one that's great, and then you just maybe go to your sipper the rest of the Night, that kind of thing.

Robert Jackson: [22:20] Got you. It's rye. And what else?

Chuck Carpenter: [22:26] Rye, absinthe oh, no, sorry. Rye, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lemon juice. My other cocktail of choice these days has been a Sazerac because it's kind of easy but complex. I'm a big fan of Alton Brown, and that's like his go-to cocktail. So when I'm cooking, I feel very Alton Brown. I make my Sazerac and then get into it. Also, rye-based.

Robert Jackson: [22:57] I dig a Sazerac. Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:02] Both the whiskey and the drink.

Robbie Wagner: [23:07] Yeah. Well, I guess we should transition away from so much whiskey talk, maybe for those who don't care for that. I think we'll have a lot of people who care more about the Ember things that we may get into.

Robert Jackson: [23:28] Need another whiskey.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:29] Yeah, good idea.

Robbie Wagner: [23:30] Start with.

Robert Jackson: [23:31] I'm going to dump my ice cube, actually.

Robbie Wagner: [23:33] Sure.

Robert Jackson: [23:36] Get rid of that ice cube.

Chuck Carpenter: [23:39] I like where you're going with this. So yeah. What's Ember? No, I'm just kidding.

Robert Jackson: [23:50] Well, when the fire burns down, the best part of the fire actually is the Embers. Really is that's my favorite part? When there's basically no light left, and it's just a red anyways. It's a weird place. I think that's more of a whatnot than the web.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:05] We can always circle back and go into that.

Robert Jackson: [24:08] I feel like it's a continuum like it's a constant motion situation.

Chuck Carpenter: [24:13] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [24:16] So I don't know how many times you've answered basically these exact same questions on other podcasts and things, but how did you get into Ember?

Robert Jackson: [24:24] Well, so forever ago, it seems like now, I worked at a healthcare company, and we did billing for those hated billing people for a group of anesthesiologists across the state of Florida. And I think right around that time, the HIPAA, which you've probably seen now at this point, was just breaking through the legislature and basically required loads and loads of changes to practices of anything with health records. Honestly, all of this stuff was good. Requires you to authorize release of records, requires the healthcare providers kept medical records secure, all that stuff. All that was really good prior to it. It was unregulated and often maintained in a way that was, for today's like 2021 standards, just super insecure, just not encrypted or all paper, and people would have stacks of paper running around, all that not-good stuff. So our billing system was all custom-written software that I wrote, and we were, in my opinion, very, very efficient. However, the requirements our compliance attorney basically told us that we could no longer cache images on the devices, on our people's devices. Like, they're doing data entry, essentially, and they're having images, and we were totally geared for like remote work. This was 20 years ago now. Well, no, shoot, I started there 20 years ago. It hasn't been 20 years since I did Ember. Ember hasn't been around 20 years, but it's been a while. Eight, nine years, something like that. And the point being, we were doing sort of .Net, like AFP Net sort of web stuff, and it just did a lot of caching. Additionally, we had some .Net WinForms-type stuff. I say .Net because then it makes me look like not an idiot, but it was all Visual Basic. So it was all Visual Basic. To this day, I think I've written more lines of code in Visual Basic than JavaScript, which, if you look at my GitHub profile, might be a bit surprising, but it is true. All it was just private code. Anyways, sorry, back to the story. The compliance attorney said we couldn't cache images on devices any longer, and again, for good reason. Like people could compromise, remote workers' machines, all that jazz. So I needed a way to have instead of using ASP net or Rails, instead of having those images refreshed and cached so that they would refresh faster. We decided to go with single-page app and make it long-lived state instead of so we didn't have to cache. It just stayed in memory, which they said was fine, basically. It's pretty crazy that we found a lawyer ten years ago. I guess that was in tune with browser caching and local on-disk caching. That still surprises me to this day but seemed great. You have to be an expert. So at that point, we were a mixture ASP, .Net, and Rails shop, and we were trying to look for an alternative. Being into the rail side, I saw Yehuda and folks in the Rails community also involved in Ember, so I decided to pick it up. This was before 1.0.0 was released onuEmber. I picked up a proof of concept and did it in a weekend like you do, I guess. And then it wasn't that I was hooked, but I saw that. Clearly, it could solve my problem. And then from there, I signed up for a training class that Yehuda and Tom put on in Chicago of all places that August, I guess, and went to that training. And that's where I met them. Although I'm sure, they don't remember me at all from that day because I wasn't involved in Ember at all. Age just with some random person in a group of 30. And at that point, I really started doing more and more Ember stuff. I got peaty annoyed at ergonomics problems, so I started fixing things. This was back before Ember CLI existed. That was the Ember App Kit, which is super long time ago. And I was filing bugs and issues on Ember App Kit, and Steph Penner pinged me, and he's like, hey, I'm just going to give you commitment, and I think your taste is good, and we'll move forward, and that way you don't have to wait on all these reviews and all this stuff. And I'm like, oh no. And so that's the curse. So then I felt somehow obligated to help everyone and support all the things, and that morphed into, well, what was wrong with Ember App Kit? For those that don't know, that was a grunt-based build pipeline and a template. So you'd clone the repo, and it would lay out your app. Since all of that code lived in your local app, it was basically impossible to upgrade because any customizations you did just turned into a liability. So there's a multi-hundred-line grunt file, and if you customize it to have special assets or to do Sass compilation or pick a thing that people care about, you ended up making tweaks to that file. So now you couldn't upgrade. You were just stuck because your upgrade was effectively try to set up Git remotes and do a Git merge tool to manually figure out the diff. It's real bad news, bears. Bad juju. The idea with Ember CLI was that the boilerplate code, the code that made the system work, was shipped in separately and independent of your code and wasn't intertwined so that you could independently upgrade individual things. That was the rough pitch. So that made a big, big difference. And being able to move to Ember CLI from App Kit meant that now I could continue to stay up to date and upgraded in my work apps and kind of keep going. But that was the downward spiral, if you will, into maintenance of all the things in the world. So I always say I credit and blame Steph at the same time for being so willing to trust a complete 100% stranger with access to the kingdom if you will. And it was a vote of confidence that I didn't deserve, but hopefully has turned out okay. At the time, I will say I also didn't know JavaScript, so like basically, at all. So I was working in Ember, trying to help out Ember, and at the time, Ember's build pipeline was actually Ruby-based, which I did know because of my Rails background. And so I started just doing PRs randomly, one-off PRs to the Ruby build pipeline, and started got to the point where I sort of owned that whole end-to-end system on Ember itself. And as I was trying to learn JavaScript, I was learning JavaScript by reading Ember's code. Which let me just tell you, do not suggest I do not. There is some of the most esoteric sort of hot path-like manual optimization stuff going on there that you might ever imagine, but that's how I learned JavaScript, I guess. So I am a poisoned mind, I think. But as we move forward, I slowly began learning more and more JavaScript and could actually do changes. And and I started with on the Ember side, started with just documentation fixes because I didn't understand how the thing worked. And I would step through the code and figure it out, and I'm like, oh, no, this documentation is wrong, or there is no documentation or whatever. And leading up to the Ember 1.0, there was a big call for documentation sort of meta issue that Trek Glowacki put together and I just picked up individual files and started reviewing them and adding documentation anyway. That was a super long-winded answer to a very short question.

Robbie Wagner: [33:38] It's a good answer, though. Yeah, I remember looking through the Ember source, like when I first started using Ember, thinking I want to contribute back in some way, and every time I would open it, I went no thanks, I have no idea what's going on in here. So yeah, that's kind of how I got more on the learning team documentation side of things. Because yeah, there's a lot of crazy stuff in there. I forget what the thing was. But there was something where there was like a website. There was like number of people that understand Ember.

Robbie Wagner: [34:08] Ember Metal. Number of people that understand Ember Metal dot com.

Robbie Wagner: [34:11] It's like 4.5 or something.

Robert Jackson: [34:14] Alex Matchneer made that site. I don't know if it's still on, but yeah, he made that site, and it's good. It's in my Chrome cache. Apparently, it is not a domain anymore, but Chrome still knows that I want to go to it. There are some details in the Metal part, the lowest level. This is a level below Ember Object. So there's no objects, there's no mix-ins, there's just relationships between at the time computer properties and observers and the dependent keys. And how do you manage what things to notify when there's a change and all that stuff? Thank goodness all that code is basically going to die. It's amazing.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:05] Going to die. So what remains?

Robert Jackson: [35:08] So we're going to have you mean today or after that's dead?

Chuck Carpenter: [35:12] How about both?

Robert Jackson: [35:15] I think the main replacement for it is not a manual declaration of computed properties where I say, hey, this is a computation I care about and these are the inputs to the computation, which is how Ember computed effectively was. Like you do Ember computed property, and then you'd say, I have these dependent keys. I care about the first name property and the last name property so that I can return name or something for lack of a better example. So that system was fine, it was good, it lasted a long time, it did great stuff. The new system is basically turning that all on its head completely. Instead of saying that you have a computation and that it has these inputs, let's instead talk about what the root states are. So the root states in this case for my little name example was the first and last name. So if I can mark that those root states are something I care to track, then any computation I do can just see, oh, I use those root states. So by definition, when I compute name I care about first and last or something like that. So that's basically the auto tracking system that we have today in Ember Octane that I think landed in Ember 3.14 or something, 3.15, but Octane era, which Octane was released in Ember 3.16. But the idea is if you can identify your root states, then all the computations can be derived from those root states, and those computations can be cached. So they invalidate when any individual root state thing is set or signed. So you set up like @tracked actually. It doesn't have to be an Ember class, any class. And that decorator turns into a getter in a setter for that property, and when it's set, we essentially invalidate anybody that had consumed the getter. So I guess that's how it works.

Chuck Carpenter: [37:16] That's a great explanation. Yeah, totally makes sense. And to be fair, I haven't really done much Ember work in the last couple of years except for Robbie forcing me into an electron app to integrate an API, a serverless API I built over the last couple of months. And I'm like, oh yeah, but it is straightforward, and I have familiarity, and going back into some of those things is nice.

Robert Jackson: [37:43] I think the nice thing about the Octane model is that you're just using JavaScript now, which if you'd asked eight years ago me if that would be a good thing, I would have said no, because eight years ago JavaScript kind of sucked. So there was no classes conceptually, there was no async await, there was no promises even in the language. So loads of good things have happened in JavaScript, and now embracing it makes a lot more sense, I think, as we continue to move forward, evolving our system to not be, oh, do it the Ember way. Well, it's just idiomatic JavaScript, just do it the JavaScript right way. And you don't need a special Ember thing. Like it's just Ember is aware of the way JavaScript works.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:28] I've got two triggers right here that I want to kind of take a pause on and see what you think. So Robbie and I tend to ying yang a little bit, and I also just probably troll him on some stuff. So two things that you talk about here in terms of idiomatic JavaScript and then just like pattern variances and differences. So we all know that React idioms are going down the functional path. So no classes whatsoever. So one of the big things you talk about and when you get rid of classes, you no longer have the benefits of decorators. So what do you think about that? Because there's a lot of popularity around that pattern.

Robert Jackson: [39:09] Sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [39:09] And you have people like Eric Elliott writing about the issues with classical inheritance and functional programming being the way for all kinds of applications. So I'm just curious, do you have opinions or feelings about that ideology?

Robert Jackson: [39:26] Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, I think that it's a bit incorrect to say that the Ember way if you will, is any way assuming classes. There's things that are nice about classes in Ember, but there's things that are nice about classes in JavaScript in general. So this may bleed into my opinion on the React position. I actually think functional programming is quite nice in a lot of cases, especially for reasoning about what's happening. And, like, I can call a function, I can step into it, I can see what's happening, I can see what it does, I can change local variables, I can do things, and it's easy to reason about. I don't have to worry about long live state because long live state is effectively a cache and valuation problem waiting to happen. So that's totally real. But the fact of the matter is, we're writing long-lived applications. They have state. So there's a bit of a balance that is important. I think the computation of what to show and how to decide what to show is like in a web app is really important. And I think having that be derivable, either functional or class-wise, I think that is the goal. The class system doesn't have to be inherently harder to understand, although I will totally agree that it often is because once you give someone inheritance, they tend to use it like, I've got a hammer, and everything's a nail. But that's not a problem with classes. That's a problem with people thinking they have to use them for every possible solution. I think oftentimes, a solution is composition, not inheritance. Having multiple classes that have long lived state that you have small one-off classes that you give as collaborators to other objects or to functions is a totally valid and useful way to code and is a nice blending between the two styles, the two functional style and the class style. So when you have state, I think when you have long live state, I think classes are the right answer, I guess.

Robbie Wagner: [41:31] Yeah. So maybe I'm just a grumpy old man on this subject, but for years and years, we had all these workarounds, like in Ember or otherwise, to do fake classes because we didn't have classes, right? Spend all this time making these objects that behaved like a Java class or some other type of class, then JavaScript finally gets classes, and everyone goes, no, we want something else now. I'm just like, what? We've been trying to get this for years, and it's nice, and now we don't want it anymore.

Robert Jackson: [42:00] I think in React case, I think that the problem and the push away from classes is really not about, well, maybe they disagree, but I perceive it not to really be about classes as a concept, insofar as it's about hey, long live state, and not rederriving the state you care about every time. That thing is really hard, and if you have classes, it's really easy to stash local properties or whatever that you use and it messes up that calculation that rederivation or deriving the current truth of the world. Ember's tracked model is trying to push you to a path where you just say the thing you care about and then you assign those things just with normal assignment like this dot foo equals bar, and then we automatically invalidate anybody that had cached those things. We're trying to blend the two, I guess, is what I'm saying. Additionally, it's totally possible to use track state, Ember's track state in functional ways. Now with the track storage primitives, which landed a few versions ago, we can look it up, but there's a polyfill as well. But the idea is if you don't have to care about when to invalidate, you can just write your computation, you can just write your getter, and it's just a pure function air quotes, and it takes the incoming root state and returns the derivative. And I think that's also the same problem on the React side. It's basically, if you have classes, you could have this long-lived state, and so your render function ends up being kind of bonkers, or it can be. It's not that it has to be, but it can end up taking so many inputs and so many branching logic, have a bunch of branching logic. So I think the idea with tracked is also to try to mitigate the same sorts of problems that the proponents of functional programming on the React side are trying to avoid.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:05] So an interesting perspective, I think, in that is that so, first of all, we're like talking about high-level ideologies, and then we're getting kind of granular into these frameworks, but the frameworks aren't really apples to apples right? Because Ember has all the pieces to sort of draw from when considering this, and React, by definition, is basically only caring about what state you pass to it, how often that changes.

Robert Jackson: [44:36] And when to render it to the.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:37] And that's it, right? And they try to simplify some of that with the whole hook working with hooks and hooks being like state in a very small context versus overall in the application. And then you can put on other layers, bigger layers there, I think they're really leaning into. And that is a thing that makes GraphQL a thing for them because GraphQL has its whole data state and caching ideology and all of that. And so they're just getting something from GraphQL trusting its state, and then looking at the view layer and making a decision whether you render or not at that.

Robert Jackson: [45:19] I think that's right. I think on the Ember side, I think our concepts around deriving state and knowing when to invalidate the derived value and recalculate it, I think that that applies view layer model layer. It applies everywhere in the Ember side. On the React side, most of the advice is exclusively about the model layer. Don't use classes. Basically is always talking about the models like components, and I think on Ember component I think if you think about it, we also are saying the same thing or similar thing. This is not me saying classes are bad. I think classes are lovely. But we guide people towards making template-only classes all the time, components all the time. And if you think about a template-only component, it really is a function where you take inputs, which is your arguments, and you derive the output state. We, as a VM, as a DOM rendering engine, just happen to know that there's only these small dynamic parts, and we can just intelligently update those, but it really is a much more functional way to think about it. You can't have local state in those worlds, right? Everything is derived from your arguments and runs down from there. So I think the thing that all of the frameworks that I know of are pushing back against is, hey, humans don't do a great job of dealing with cache invalidation, and we should try to guide them towards the pit of success instead of down the pit of doom. I guess that's how I think about it.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:59] Yeah, that and naming things. We're not good at cache and naming things.

Robert Jackson: [47:04] I went off by one. If we're missing them.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:07] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [47:09] But whatever.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:11] I have a moment here to lean into. I want this T-shirt, and I've seen terrible variations. And then I saw this really kind of good, like, programming kind of one. And it basically is like a function that outputs cache rules everything around me. Cash spelled our way. And that is a dream of mine that I keep hoping to receive on some Christmas or birthday gift, but it hasn't happened yet.

Robert Jackson: [47:39] You've got to just go to Cotton Bureau, own that thing, and submit the design. It'll be great.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:44] Fun fact, we have our design on Cotton Bureau purely for the ability to do one off shirts. And they accepted it. The giant octopus.

Robert Jackson: [47:53] That's great.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:54] It's on there.

Robbie Wagner: [47:55] I think we sold ten.

Robert Jackson: [47:56] Yeah, but I subscribe to their T-Shirt Tuesday newsletter, and I order random T-shirts from them roughly monthly.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:06] Yeah, why not? There we go. See, that is why. That's one of the reasons we print off some swag a couple of times a year. So we have gotten some things for my kids, but they keep growing. I don't know what happens. And that goes pretty quickly.

Robert Jackson: [48:29] I think it has to do with feeding them. If you just stop, maybe they wouldn't grow.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:34] And then my guilt grows. So, like, which one is better?

Robert Jackson: [48:38] True story.

Robbie Wagner: [48:41] Can't relate.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:45] Yeah. That's your get off my lawn.

Robert Jackson: [48:47] Dogs keep growing.

Robbie Wagner: [48:47] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:48] Not really. They keep snoring, though. I'm aware of that.

Robbie Wagner: [48:51] Definitely.

Robert Jackson: [48:51] They're very small dogs.

Chuck Carpenter: [48:54] Yeah, they grow this way more horizontally.

Robert Jackson: [48:57] I got a pandemic dog that's much larger than my other dog. He's a 90-pound mutt.

Chuck Carpenter: [49:05] Oh, wow.

Robert Jackson: [49:06] Yeah.

Robbie Wagner: [49:07] How many other dogs do you have?

Robert Jackson: [49:11] When we moved up here in Rhode Island, we had a whole arc. I drove in a minivan. I have a picture. I'll have to dig it up for you. I'll link you. But we drove up here. We had four dogs, three cats, two birds and two kids and two guinea pigs, and a goldfish all in the car in one minivan. That's a lot of things to put in a minivan, just so you know, over the years. That was six, seven years ago now. And two of the dogs passed away. So we have two dogs left. One is a puppy from that time, and she is a golden doodle. She's just a fluff ball of love and adoration. And she's like 40 ish pounds, give or take. And and then we just adopted a dog from a rescue in Puerto Rico. Actually. The Sato project it was. But during the pandemic times, all of the local humane shelters or whatever all they had no dogs, which I guess is a good condition for them, honestly. But we were going to be home for a long time. It's a great time to break in a new puppy. And that was, I'm sure, what everyone else thought, actually, as well.

Chuck Carpenter: [50:32] Right.

Robert Jackson: [50:34] But, yeah, we adopted one. He flew in from Puerto Rico, and we got him in August. So he's just a mutt, basically. He's 50, some odd percent German shepherd. So that's where the size comes from. But then, like, shih tzu and one other beagle. Beagle. Shih tzu and Beagle. Those are the three main things. And I don't know how you get those that crossed.

Robbie Wagner: [51:00] There's some logistics issues there.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:01] I want to come back to The Dukes of Hazard. Did you name him Flash?

Robert Jackson: [51:07] No, his name is Rory. So our other dog's name is Clara, and this is a Doctor Who throwback here. So Clara and Rory are both Doctor Who characters from the reboot, not the original old wacky one. Sorry if that offends anyone.

Robbie Wagner: [51:27] I haven't watched either, so.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:30] Same. Actually, I started watching Jupiter's Legacy recently. In terms of the Sci-Fi superhero realm.

Robert Jackson: [51:39] How have you liked it?

Chuck Carpenter: [51:40] More than I thought I would. Because, no offense to Transformers, I like Transformers in general just because I grew up with them, but.

Robert Jackson: [51:47] Sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [51:48] Josh Jamal. I was like. I don't know, maybe not too great. But yeah. I'm quite interested in the story. I know it's based on comics. I don't have time to read things but stay up late, drink whiskey and watch something on Netflix that my wife doesn't want to see.

Robert Jackson: [52:05] That's something you for.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:06] Boom. I can do that. Yeah, thus far, a few episodes in. Yeah. I think the story is interesting enough that I'm into it. That's how I usually watch those Marvel things. It used to be on a plane going somewhere. Hasn't been much of that lately.

Robert Jackson: [52:21] You don't have to do that. Yes, for better or worse, I guess.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:26] Disney plus for my kids.

Robert Jackson: [52:28] Our situations are somewhat reversed in the sense that my wife just vets new stuff for me, and she says, you'd like this? Or, no, you wouldn't like that. So she just watched Troopers Legacy, and she's like, you should watch it. It's a little dark for you, but it's going to be fun. You'll like it? Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good. Ringing endorsement from the boss of me.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:49] Yeah, I like that. I don't think I've really gotten into the dark parts yet, so I'm looking forward to that then.

Robert Jackson: [52:57] Sorry, I hope no spoilers here.

Chuck Carpenter: [52:58] No spoilers, but did you watch WandaVision?

Robert Jackson: [53:03] I did. I loved WandaVision. That was great. I'm roughly allergic to the old school. I guess old school. When we were growing up, everything would come out weekly, and you'd have to show up at a time and watch it. I hate that. I can't stand it. I just want to binge it. So we waited till all of them were out and we watched them all. Me, myself, my wife, and the two boys, 13 and eleven and a half. We watched them all straight through. We started a little bit too late, so we didn't finish till like 01:00 a.m. But it wasn't that. It was like six and a half hours. So it's not too much content. Maybe seven. It's something like that. There's not that many, and we really enjoyed it. We also did the same thing for the other one. The Winter Soldier. No Winter Soldier. And no, it's not just the Winter Soldier.

Chuck Carpenter: [53:55] It's the Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Robert Jackson: [53:57] The Falcon and Winter Soldier. Yeah. So we did the same thing for that. We enjoyed both were great. The whole family plus one. You should watch them both.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:08] Yeah, I agree. I watched both. I collected comics as a kid, so I'm into that whole universe of things. Yeah. I feel my my son loves, so my son is four, my daughter's two. I started late in the game. It's a young man's game, Robbie.

Robert Jackson: [54:24] That's a nice split.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:25] Oh, it's perfect.

Robert Jackson: [54:28] By the time you're out of diapers, you're out of diapers.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:32] So, started late in the whole game. Infants are tough. Get going, Robbie. But the fact that we had that split is good, though, so we were lucky there. Both times planned and first time.

Robert Jackson: [54:49] Nice. That's great.

Chuck Carpenter: [54:50] I don't know. Yeah. I don't want to be braggadocious, but I know it's sometimes tough.

Robbie Wagner: [54:55] Without going into much detail, we've tried a little bit and haven't had a ton of success yet.

Robert Jackson: [55:02] This is the key, Robbie. The practice.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:04] Exactly. Keep practicing. That's the number one thing.

Robert Jackson: [55:07] Practice makes perfect. That's what they say.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:13] So, Robbie, do you not do the Marvel Universe?

Robbie Wagner: [55:17] No, I do. So you were saying that's on Netflix.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:21] No, those are both on Disney Plus.

Robert Jackson: [55:23] All the Marvel stuff is on Disney Plus.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:25] Yeah, right.

Robbie Wagner: [55:29] I honestly forget who's Marvel and who's not, but all the shows that were on Netflix, like Daredevil and stuff, that was Marvel, right?

Robert Jackson:[55:35] That was Marvel universe. Yeah, exactly. But then, once Disney bought Marvel, which has been a while now, but they're sort of taking over the whole universe.

Chuck Carpenter: [55:47] Yeah, those licenses expired and all that stuff.

Robbie Wagner: [55:50] Yeah, I watched all of those when they were on Netflix, like Daredevil, Iron Fist. I liked all those.

Robert Jackson: [55:54] Luke Cage, I think those were great. Okay, so let's talk a minute about Iron Fist. It was a little hokey.

Robbie Wagner: [56:03] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:04] I didn't love it.

Robert Jackson: [56:06] But I loved it.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:06] Did you? Okay.

Robert Jackson: [56:08] It was so hokey. So here's the thing. If you can suspend disbelief about these things, then it's fine, but there's some levels where I just can't. This one, I'm like, it's fine. Maybe it was enough whiskey. Maybe that was the key.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:23] Yeah, could be. There's certainly no opinions cast here. I think I watched, like, two episodes, and I was like, I don't know. There's some appropriation here, and it was a little like, kooky. Although I watched Cobra Kai, and I loved it. So I don't know.

Robert Jackson: [56:41] I haven't watched Cobra Kai. I do love the original Karate Kid movies, but I'm like, I don't want those spoiled. Like, the memory of those movies in my head is, like, foundational to my reality.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:51] It's just as cheesy as those movies. So that's where it delivers.

Robert Jackson: [56:54] So it can't ruin it. Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [56:56] Yeah. It's just as cheesy in those ways. So it kind of, like, keeps that going.

Robert Jackson: [57:00] All right, so we've avoided talking about the absolute best show that I watched in 2020, which was Ted Lasso. Have you all watched it?

Robbie Wagner: [57:11] Have not seen it yet.

Robert Jackson: [57:13] Okay. It is the most enjoyment I have had watching a television show literally ever now. Well, compounding factors, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:25] I don't know how much you have Internet stalked me. I'm guessing probably a lot. So I am a massive European football fan. I follow Manchester United. So I'm in the English League. I mean, for a very long time. Proper football is what we prefer to say in these parts.

Robert Jackson: [57:46] Sounds great.

Chuck Carpenter: [57:48] So I was familiar with that character because when NBC acquired the PL.

Robert Jackson: [57:54] The old skits. What six, seven years ago?

Chuck Carpenter: [57:58] Yeah, it's been like a few years or whatever, and so that character, and then when they pitched it on the whole Apple TV thing, I got that free because I bought my wife a new iPhone, so oh, awesome. Win-win here. Watched it. Yeah, it was great. There's a lot of diversity to Jason Sedekis, like the comedy and the empathy that you get there. I don't know. I enjoyed it a lot, too.

Robert Jackson: [58:24] The whole time, and this is the cynic in me the whole time, I was waiting for the shoe to drop and some sort of evil plot to come out, but you have to watch it to see. I've since made those little biscuits, the little shortbread biscuits that he's got. Damn it, Robbie and all of the other people. I guess we don't have to think about them, though.

Chuck Carpenter: [58:59] All 60 people who listen to us.

Robert Jackson: [59:04] Apple had an event not too long ago, and in their slides, where they have a bunch of icons or references, they had a reference to Ted Lasso's biscuits, and they had, like a half cut off line of the top line of a recipe and someone, like, reverse engineered what the actual line was and then found it. Apple knew they were going to do that.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:27] Yeah. Also, fun fact that biscuits in England are just cookies. Crisps are chips. Chips and fries.

Robert Jackson: [59:36] So the chips and fries and crisps, that thing is very confusing to me.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:41] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [59:42] Because when someone says it's fish and chips, I want to know because I'm sorry, but I've been places where they give me literal American chips, and I'm like, no, this should have walked out the meal. This is not what I signed up for. I ordered fish and chips. I expected fries. I expected a basket full of fried food.

Chuck Carpenter: [59:59] Yeah. And if I get chips without malt vinegar, I'm out. Also, if I get the right chips, no malt vinegar, I'm out.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:06] So here's my problem with the malt vinegar. The entire table has to use it, or I don't want it because it ruins my entire experience. If I'm having something it doesn't take malt vinegar, and I have to smell malt vinegar, my whole meal is ruined.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:20] Yeah, well, then, there you go. You just have to go to a chippy. Go to a chippy in England or Ireland. That's what you get. Everybody's having the same thing. Happy.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:30] Yeah. I think the thing we just discovered is I just have to always be the one that uses the malt vinegar, and then it's never a problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:36] Yes. Just opt into it regardless.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:39] Perfect.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:39] As soon as someone or fish and chips, you're like, I know. I know what I'm going to get.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:44] Sign me up.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:45] Yeah, solved.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:46] Put me in, coach.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:49] If we ever share a meal together and there are fish and chips, real chips involved, we'll know what's coming. Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [01:00:55] We'll know what happens.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:00:57] You're like, this guy's not going to settle for tartar sauce. What the hell is tartar sauce?

Robert Jackson: [01:01:01]What about hot sauce? Do you do malt vinegar and hot sauce?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:05] What? No. First of all, Europeans are afraid of hot sauce, in my experience.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:10] Yeah, but that's their problem.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:11] Yeah. So I have tend to have things.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:14] I feel like that could be a character flaw.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:15] I don't know. Could be why we won. I don't know. But I tend to lean into, especially like local native foods or whatnot. I tend to lean into the way intended. I don't know.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:34] Sure.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:39] Tacos and hot sauce. I'm into that. Thai food. Hot sauce into that.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:46] Spicy stuff.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:48] I just kind of tend to go that way.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:49] Where do you come down on the waffles and chicken waffles situation?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:55] Yes. Strong opinions here.

Robert Jackson: [01:01:57] This is a really specific situation.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:01:59] I can't believe you stumbled into this because this is great. Yeah, I grew up in an urban area, but, like, deeply tied to Southern roots, and my grandparents cooked Southern food and all that kind of thing. So I grew up in Kentucky, but I was like across the river from Cincinnati and very connected to that kind of urban area, but also yeah, fried chicken, biscuits, all those things. Very connected to that. Yes. So I want hot sauce on my chicken, and I want honey on my biscuits. Absolutely.

Robert Jackson: [01:02:31] Perfect. I'm sold. I'm right there. That's exactly my take. I do think that you can substitute on a chicken and waffle situation. You can substitute real maple syrup for the honey, personally. Basically, to me, the thing is the sweet and the hot together. That's the thing. And the savoriness of the chicken, right? Like some salt, some pepper, like some savoriness. More than just hot. So you get the whole gamut of flavors in that dish. It's pretty amazing. I cannot convince my children, but more for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:02] Maybe if you just add Kool-Aid with it. So there's a place here, and they really lean into it, and you get Kool-Aid. There's a great chicken and waffles place here in Phoenix. People connected to very Southern food, and they do like, you get your chicken, you get your waffles, and then you can get Kool-Aid in a Mason jar.

Robbie Wagner: [01:03:22] What's it called? Shout them out.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:24] Oh, Lo-Lo's chicken and waffles. It's amazing. It's best-fried chicken.

Robert Jackson: [01:03:27] Also, amazing name. Well, hold on. When I Googled chicken waffles Kool-Aid, literally first hit Lo-Lo's beverage selection.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:03:36] Wow. There you go. Yeah. Lolo's is amazing here, and I do love Southern fried chicken, but I have a very conflicting feeling about the best-fried chicken. Not style. Just like if you're just saying the best-fried chicken, Korean fried chicken is pretty good. There's a place they have one in DC. Actually, we just opened one here.

Robbie Wagner: [01:04:00] Bonchon.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:00] Yes. Bonchon Bonchon chicken.

Robert Jackson: [01:04:03] I don't think I've ever had Korean fried chicken.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:06] Yes, you got to try it's twice fried. It's twice-fried. So they have a light batter, more of like a tempura batter.

Robert Jackson: [01:04:13] Yeah. So for a long time, I lived in central Florida, and we just didn't have where I lived. We didn't have a lot of options. I'm not saying Florida doesn't. Florida has got tons of options, but where I lived, there was just not a lot of diversity in culinary choices, lots of great Southern food. But that was the limit. So I have to give it a whirl. I know over in Providence, they've got a place that does Korean fried chicken, so I have to give it a whirl.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:41] You really should. Twice fried.

Robbie Wagner: [01:04:45] Bonchon does, like, they have to fry it fresh, too. So, like, you order it, and it's like, 45 minutes before you can get it. I don't know if it's like that everywhere but plan ahead. Get some appetizers or something.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:04:56] Yeah, they have, like, bulgogi fried rice and some other stuff that's really good. Yeah, it's highly recommended. I've had some non-Bonchon things that are also quite good in La. There are some really great Korean fried chicken places, but Bonchon is the truth on the East Coast for me.

Robert Jackson: [01:05:15] I have to find, I have to find one out.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:20] What not about food works for everybody.

Robert Jackson: [01:05:22] Who doesn't like food, especially, I don't know. I'm a somewhat reformed fat man, but I'm still in that body.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:05:34] Well, Jim Gaffigan has that whole skit where he's, like, talking about vacations and vacations, or you go somewhere, and then you just talk about what you're going to eat, and you talk about, where are we going to go for lunch? And then you do the lunch thing, and then during lunch, he's like, where are we going to go for dinner?

Robert Jackson: [01:05:50] Yeah. I'm a constant planner. I want to know. I've been on two years of calorie counting, so I'm very specific. I want to plan the whole day in the morning because I need to know how many calories I need to save for dinner or lunch or whatever. I'm going to have a piece of toast with nothing on it for breakfast if I'm going to go to some nice dinner or lunch or something. So I've got to know, got to know ahead of time. It drives my wife crazy. She hates it because she's one of those folks that really doesn't know what she wants to eat until it's time to eat. Like, I'm hungry. Let's decide now. Now's the time. Can't plan ahead because I would have planned the wrong thing. Now is the time to decide.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:06:36] Right. Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [01:06:38] And that's a tough one for me. Whereas I could. Eat literally the same food like I have every day for breakfast. Five eggs and two pieces of rye toast. That's breakfast every day.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:06:50] Are your eggs fried or scrambled?

Robert Jackson: [01:06:53] So fried most of the time. We have chickens, so we have roughly 18 to 20 chickens. So we have fresh eggs, which is hard to beat. It's hard to beat the fresh eggs.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:05] Can't beat it at all. I have this obsession with the French way of cooking eggs. So I used to be a fried eggs person, but then I switched to scrambled when I do them myself, which is like very low temperature, setting some butter down, and you just put the eggs right in the pan, and you're basically constantly moving.

Robert Jackson: [01:07:24] The whole time. Gordon Ramsay did that? Yes.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:30] Ludo is the one that I look to because he makes that whole omelet with, like, the Boursin cheese in the middle, and he's just like slowly doing and eventually folding it up.

Robert Jackson: [01:07:42] I love scrambled eggs, but my problem is oftentimes they're way overcooked. They need to be moist.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:07:50] I don't have them unless I make them. That's it.

Robert Jackson: [01:07:52] Yeah, it's usually just too much. So, funny story, the Ember Core team, we have quarterly face-to-face meetings where we all sort of get together and have meetings, and for a long, long time, we would rent like Airbnb of a place with like ten bedrooms or some crazy number and all get-together. And Igor Terzic actually was the first one to make these scrambled eggs for me. Sorry. The whole point of that story was that we all take turns making all the meals, but the point was that there's just a massively more time to connect and discuss random technical problems with subgroups and whatever than if you just go in a boardroom and have a meeting for 8 hours or something. But anyway, Igor made a killer scrambled eggs. He sent me the video, and I've tried to make it. I'm like, no, you've got to come over to my house, and you've got to make me eggs.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:50] There you go.

Robert Jackson: [01:08:51] That's what I try to tell him.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:08:54] It's a good way to lube him into it.

Robert Jackson:[01:08:57] Well, he went to college up in New Hampshire, so he's not that far.

Robbie Wagner: [01:09:05] All right, well, we are well over an hour now, so guess we'll end it here.

Robert Jackson: [01:09:10] What is the goal?

Robbie Wagner:[01:09:12] What do you mean, hour, give or take?

Robert Jackson: [01:09:15] Okay, perfect.

Robbie Wagner: [01:09:15] Yeah, it's usually more like 45 minutes, but doesn't matter. We could keep going if you want, but we can also just chat offline.

Robert Jackson: [01:09:24] No, we're good. I smell food brewing upstairs.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09:28] Okay, so our timing is perfect.

Robert Jackson: [01:09:30] We're having fajitas in my future.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:09:34] You know what? Next time around, we're going to talk about this. I have a real issue with self-assembling foods. At home, probably. Okay. But I'm never going to a restaurant where I've got to do work for the food. Fajitas is one part.

Robert Jackson: [01:09:46] I totally agree. So I want to eat a bowl. I never have the again. See prior conversation about calorie counting. The tortilla is just a waste of space. Waste of calories. It's a lot of calories. I love them, but there are way too many calories. Like half a cup of rice and 8oz 10oz of chicken that is all fried nice with seared, and seasoned nicely. Hot sauce. And those vegetables, man. That's where it's at. If you get some kimchi.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10:17] Oh, yes. Well, kimchi is a fusion, so that's a separate conversation. Wedge salad is my nemesis.

Robert Jackson: [01:10:28] While we're at it, the chopped salad where they serve you the thing and all the things are separate. I'm like, what are you doing? Just toss it. You have a big bowl. You filled this bowl. I cannot mix this salad without making a mess. What do you want from me?

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10:40] Yeah.

Robert Jackson: [01:10:43] That drives me nuts. Drives me crazy. This is with a year of reflection. Have not gone out and had a nice salad for a while.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10:52] Yeah, that's true.

Robert Jackson: [01:10:53] Those jerks.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:10:54] I don't want to work for it. It's a great segue.

Robbie Wagner: [01:10:59] Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe and let us know if you have any suggestions for future whiskeys or things like that.